"I would like to apologise to him. I know his name, but I don't know where he is. He was probably like myself when I went into infants, vulnerable and sensitive, and you can make the leap of... I felt powerless, so I made somebody else powerless."

Eccleston also went into detail about his experiences being bullied.

"I was bullied at school from the age of 5 by a girl who was 7, and it happened every playtime," he recalled. "Playtime became terror time for me.

"She would trap me against the wall. She would make me do sums, maths, and it really collared my life.

"I didn't want to go to school. I certainly didn't want to go out at playtime. But this was in 1969 on a council estate in Manchester, and as I've grown up and thought about that girl, she seemed not as cared for physically as some of the other children, and my thought is, 'God knows what was going on at home'."